With venture capital, the startup company issues private shares in exchange for money.

The venture capitalist's partnership fund actually becomes a partial owner of the startup. Additionally, venture capital is usually only used with high growth industries, where risk is much higher. In these cases, there are little or no assets to back the loan in the event of default so the likelihood of obtaining a loan is much lower, and the potential payouts must be drastically higher to result in a successful investment.

Timing. Venture capital is typically not used for extremely early funding. Instead, these rounds are often called "Series AA," or "Pre-A" rounds, and include funding from friends & family, angel investors, and seed stagefinancing syndicates and firms. Venture capital firms usually get involved at the Series A round and after (all happening after the AA or Pre-A rounds). Although both VC and seed/angel investing are high risk investments, seed & angel investing usually happen in the earliest stages of a startup when the risk is ultra-high.

Funding Amounts. Venture capital also usually starts with companies that are slightly more mature (although not necessarily profitable), with higher valuations, and higher funding amounts. Funding amounts in angel & seed investing typically range from a couple thousand USD through to one million USD, while venture capital is usually millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Deal Structure. Angel investing also frequently uses different deal structures than VC, although this is primarily to reduce legalcosts, cut transactionoverhead, and rapidly accelerate the rate at which the startup and angel investor can agree on terms. Some of these alternative structures include convertible notes and SAFEs ("simple agreement for future equity"). Unlike venture capital, convertible notes and SAFEs don't actually transfer equity in the company to the investor until a later date, and in the case of failed startups, sometimes not even at all.

Venture Capital vs Crowdfunding

The primary difference between venture capital and crowdfunding is simply equity. Venture capitalists acquire equity in the startup. Crowdfunders do not. Instead, crowdfunding is much more like a high-risk pre-order platform, where there's a reasonableprobability that the startup may fail to deliver the pre-order.